Autumn is a second Spring, when every leaf is a flower……Albert Camus
Autumn in the Blue Mountains of Australia is one of the most beautiful times of the year. The trees are ablaze with the most magnificent colours and the streets are carpeted with the falling leaves. It looks, smells and sounds wonderful. As you walk through the leaves you can hear them crunching underfoot. It truly is a feast for the senses.
I love Autumn. So of course, this time of year brings out the need to do lots of photoshoots. In a previous post, I had my beautiful model in a bath full of Autumn Leaves. Loving those colours so much, I ventured a little further afield to Mount Wilson.
Mount Wilson is a delightful surprise. The drive out there is a bit scrubbier than most of our local landscape and suddenly it starts to turn into a bit of a rainforest type of environment. Just when you think that’s what you should be expecting, a quaint little English style village emerges out of nowhere, a little like Brigadoon. It is always beautiful but in Autumn, it looks like a painting you would find on the lid of a chocolate box. Don’t expect to be able to buy a lot out there. There’s a little cafe but I think that’s about it. Who cares? You go there to soak in the beauty.
I had an idea which needed lots of autumn leaves, so I ordered some silk ones in from China. Very cheap but very effective. I thought 400 would be heaps but when I started pinning them to the dress I chose there were nowhere near as many as I thought there’d be but I didn’t want to cover the dress, so it was enough. I packed my lovely model Kirsty in the car and off we went.
Unfortunately I didn’t check the calendar to see what would be happening out there and it was open garden day on a public holiday, so it was packed and trying to get a clear spot to do a photo was almost impossible. We didn’t let it stop us, we found a few spots that were almost clear and we did our stuff.
I was working on another image last night and had extended the canvas from 9 photos, recoloured, made adjustments and was just ready to add textures when Photoshop crashed. Silly me hadn’t saved it as a PSD before I started, so I lost the lot.. Ahh well. Lesson learned. Back to the drawing board.
These are a few of the (saved) images we created.
Livonne Imagery 